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Tuesday, June 5, 2012

MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 2

Old Style Oil Derricks

In the first post of this series, among other things, Dredd Blog quoted from an author who wrote about the sovereign oil government in his book "Private Empire."

Regular readers know that MOMCOM is an acronym we use to symbolize the Military Oil Media Complex, because the old descriptions, such as "Military Industrial Complex (MIC)", leave out what the U.S. Department of Energy calls "the lifeblood of America’s economy" - oil, and also leave out the mouthpiece of power - the media (BTW, it is not the free press).

The basic narrative is that private international oil corporations call the shots or govern nations of the world.

Thus, the word "government", in the real world, is not limited to the politicians in office, nor limited to government departments they oversee, nor is it limited to the uniformed military, rather, it includes all individuals who comprise The Private World Empire, and the heart and core of the governing is MOMCOM.

The media portion of The Private World Empire of MOMCOM has the primary function of covering up the reality and replacing it with fiction:

One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries — in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control"

(The Deceit Business). The beginning of that propaganda, "roughly around time of WWI", was engineered in the United States by Edward L. Bernays, who knew all about how governing is done:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

The big dirty oil business is significant to the outcome of governing, and is easier to see in some places than in others:

ill "Beyond Petroleum" oil giant BP pick the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest today in Baku, Azerbaijan? If so, I wouldn't be surprised.

When I was arrested by the military police of Azerbaijan during my investigation of BP for Channel 4's Dispatches in 2010, one of the cops who surrounded our crew in the desert told us, with great pride:

"BP drives this country."

The Modern Oil Derrick

Indeed it does.

In 1992, the newly independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan elected a kindly Muslim Professor, Abulfaz Elchibey, as President.

But the voters had made an error: Elchibey refused to give BP an exclusive contract to drill the nation's massive Caspian Sea fields as the company wished. In 1993, with the assistance and, reportedly, guns provided by MI6, Elchibey was overthrown by the nation's former Soviet KGB boss, Heydar Aliyev.

Within three months, Aliyev handed BP a sweetheart deal, called "The Contract of the Century", to take Azerbaijan's Caspian oil.

The same phenomenon has happened, and still is happening, in the United States:

Let’s start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for dec­ades. We’re all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won’t run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth—that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets. Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.) Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, “There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.”

(The Price of Inequality). The Private Empire constantly impoverishes the people who are the real owners of the oil of their various nations, constantly corrupts the puppet politicians it owns, and constantly pollutes the Earth with its drug we call dirty oil.

The Military portion of MOMCOM, the most non-civilian looking member of The Private World Empire, is governed in the same manner as the others:

The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain.

Known and documented from information in the public domaine including Annual Reports of the US Congress, we have a fairly good understanding of the strucuture of US military expenditure, the network of US military bases and the shape of this US military-strategic configuration in different regions of the World.

The objective of this article is to build a summary profile of the World network of military bases, which are under the jurisdiction and/or control of the US. The spatial distribution of these military bases will be examined together with an analysis of the multibillion dollar annual cost of their activities.

(The Worldwide Network). The Private World Empire of the 1% has a military at their disposal which has been financed by the taxes levied upon U.S. taxpayers.

It would become unstable if limited to one nation, because any plutocracy that establishes a plutonomy becomes inherently unstable:

... the U.S. is becoming a Plutonomy – an economy dependent on the spending and investing of the wealthy. And Plutonomies are far less stable than economies built on more evenly distributed income and mass consumption.

One stark example of how The Private Oil Empire trumps national norms is shown in a federal lawsuit where U.S. DOJ lawyers are taking the side of oil rich Saudi Arabia, even though Saudis financed 9/11 hijackers (Fighting Terrorism For 200 Years).

Before closing this post, I ask you to note that the picture of a private empire includes conflict among or between some of the private entities involved on the world scene, which, in the media version of reality, is made to look like conflicts between or among nations.

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